SynonymsEEG, neural population models of; fMRI BOLD, neural population models of; Multimodal neural population models
DefinitionNeuroimaging denotes measurements of the brain with sufficient spatial resolution to construct maps of anatomy (structural neuroimaging) and activity (functional neuroimaging), respectively. Where a functional neuroimaging modality can capture spatial snapshots at sufficient speed, its data can be used to infer spatiotemporal brain dynamics. The spatial resolution of noninvasive functional neuroimaging in humans is limited to about one millimeter and requires the coherent activity of a large number of neurons to generate a signal that exceeds the noise floor. This is an ideal match for neural population models (NPMs), which are designed to capture the mass activity of neural groupings at mesoscopic scales and above. However, in order to compare NPM predictions to neuroimaging data, one also has to include signal expression -a measurement function -that maps the NPM-generated activity onto the sensor recordings. For most popular neuroimaging modalities, including multimodal approaches, such forward modelling "pipelines" are now available and have been used to predict and analyze data.